


For Glory or an Early Death

by scioscribe



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King, The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Danger, F/F, First Time, Friendship/Love, Loss of Virginity, Vaginal Fingering, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 17:17:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13104849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Nadine takes steps to end Flagg's claim on her, and theka-tetfinds a door in the woods.





	For Glory or an Early Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> I'm fudging canon timelines a little for my purposes, but in _The Stand_ , this takes place roughly after Nadine propositions Larry, and in DT-verse, at the beginning of _The Waste Lands_. Also, original _Stand_ timeline, not updated nineties setting.
> 
> I hope you have a great Yuletide!

**1**

“Thought we left all this behind on the beach,” Susannah said.

Eddie shrugged.  “Beats the hell out of me.”

They were looking at a door.  It stood all by itself, the way their own had, but it didn’t have the same scuffed-up, knocked-around look.  Eddie could remember how the sea salt on the breeze had worried away a little bit of the finish of Odetta Holmes’s door, gnawing it with pinprick teeth, aging it to soft driftwood.  This one looked new.  This one looked—and it kind of pissed him off a little, though he didn’t know why— _suburban_.  Picnic-napkin white, varnished to a shine, and with a frosted glass window with gingham curtains drawn on the nonexistent other side.  It looked like the kind of door that would call a Homeowner’s Association about the graffiti on it.

Which said—getting down to brass tacks like he guessed they had to—THE MAID.

He tapped the letters with one finger, feeling like he might as well go whole hog afterwards and knock on wood; his hand almost itched to do it.  “What do you think?”

“That for all that’s scrawled up there in hoity-toity handwriting, it doesn’t look like the home of any hired help _I_ ever met.”

“Did you have any?”

He asked it absently, his eyes still on the door, but Susannah couldn’t answer it in the same way.  Nothing about her history felt light to her yet.   _Odetta did_ , she almost said, but she was trying to knit her two lives together, knit whatever _that_ ragged life was, all-in-all, to _his_.

So she told him about Andrew, who, she couldn’t help thinking, wouldn’t have approved much at all of Eddie.  Probably would have called him “this Eddie Dean,” a verbal tic he’d taken on with half the men and all the boys Odetta had ever gone with.  He had always worried over her.  How worried would he be now, with her gone in the blink of an eye?  Poor Andrew, with his loyalty and his skepticism and the starched cuffs of his shirtsleeves bright white against the dark blue of his chauffeur’s jacket.  He’d never have liked her risking herself on adventure.

Eddie soaked up all she was telling him and at least a little of what she wasn’t: he could read the distance in her eyes.  Just because he’d left nothing behind him but Henry’s head on the floor of Balazar’s—thinking of it, he shook himself like a wet dog, trying to cast off the memory of the ashy gauntness of Henry’s hollowed-in cheeks—didn’t mean she didn’t have things to miss.  People.  With all the partiality of a lover, he doubted anybody with a good head on his shoulders could have so much as seen her without longing for her ever after.

“We better get on back and tell him about it,” Susannah said.  “Or break it down for firewood, I guess, kill two damn errands with one stone.”  It came to her then that they could open it themselves.  They hadn’t talked about it much yet, but they both knew Roland had a weight on his mind.  It was in the way he looked at Eddie’s knife when Eddie whittled, the way he watched smooth ribbons of ash or cedar come up in curls from the blade.  Like he was thinking of paring himself down a little, cutting away whatever was eating at him.

Though she guessed if a gunslinger were going to die at his own hand, he would die by his own gun.  The knife would never enter into it.

“I don’t think so,” Eddie said quietly, and she knew by the way he said it that he was turning down both bits of foolishness, the firewood and the forthrightness.  “No matter how much Mid-World dirt we get under our fingernails, Suze, I don’t think we qualify for citizenship.  Border crossing’s maybe not for us.”

There was enough Detta in her still that hearing that something wasn’t for her made her want to take it all the more, but she relented.  She settled for fixing the spot in her mind, a compass point that in this world was truer than north.  She could feel something of what was behind it, she thought.  Maybe more than Eddie could.  And that was because of Detta too, because it was the kind of feeling Detta had liked to stir up in people: terror and troubled lust.   _Anticipation_.

**2**

Nadine could feel him like a hand on her throat.  In the morning, he was there, a diligent lover reaching over from the other side of the bed to check her pulse.  By day, his grip was tighter than any collar.  But the nights were the worst.  At night, the touch turned to a caress.

After Larry had denied her, she had taken the box with the children’s Ouija board, with its cheap little plastic planchette, and put it on her knees as she sat on the sofa, and only at the last moment had she made some squalling noise of resistance, primitive as a baby’s cry, and forced it away from her.  She had kicked it under the sofa and there it still crouched, waiting.  An egg that would hatch sooner or later.

 _Of course it will_ , something inside her said.   _Since you wait for it so patiently, since you keep it so warm._

 _I tried to give myself away_ , she thought.   _Dammit, I did.  I knelt down for him in the street._

_But why him?  Why Larry?_

Oh, a hundred reasons, none of which would satisfy the voice, which sounded like her own in the times she least liked herself: when she had taken a rare dislike to a student and heard a scolding, hectoring tone creep into her every word.  Why _not_ Larry?  He was a good man.  Even better, he was a good man who’d not been good by nature.  ( _I like him,_ the voice, his voice, had whispered to her when she and Larry had first met.   _He’s almost my kind of guy.  Not a righteous man, baby, if you get my drift.  If you_ dig _it.)_ He wasn’t the kind who would rap his knuckles against her soul and find it hollow; he would understand.

Better still, he wanted her.  Even now he did, no matter what he said, what he did or didn’t do.  And she wanted _him_ , and wasn’t she allowed to be hungry?  To have her own choice?

_To have the choice your lover approved?  He practically gave you permission.  He knew Larry would say no._

Well, if not Larry, she didn’t know what other choice she was supposed to make.  Was she supposed to just go door-to-door looking for some man willing to _stick it in her?_

That settled something inside her.  Nothing like a little righteous indignation to open the door to the dark—

 _Door_.

For some reason, she looked up at own front door, at its smooth white panels, at its earnest checked curtains.  God, she hated this house.  Why had she chosen it?  Why hadn’t she made herself a home worth staying in?

If she had wanted all along to leave, well, then: time to go.  Maybe it was fate.  She found that strangely, intoxicatingly delicious to believe; it pardoned her so absolutely.  No matter what she had done, she would still be getting on her knees a second time now, getting on her knees to reach under the sofa and slide the Ouija board back out.  It hadn’t even been under there long enough to gather dust and, noticing that, a kind of acidic shame washed through her.  But he would take care of all that.  There would be no shame where she was going.

She opened the box, cardboard squeaking against cardboard in a low whine.

She spread out the board against the coffee table.  It was so badly made that it wouldn’t stay quite flat; it kept bowing out at the fold.  She took out the planchette.

She remembered why she had picked the house: not because she’d come to it planning to leave it, but because its backyard connected with the house Dayna Jurgens had moved into.  So it had been a choice after all.

Again she lifted her head and looked at the door.

 _That’s where he’ll come through_ , Nadine thought, and all ideas of fate left her.  She pressed the planchette down hard against her thigh, its triangle shape digging into her skin through the thin fabric of her skirt.   _He’ll carry me out the way a groom would carry a bride in.  And once we’re over the threshold—_

 _Stop it_.   _You’re losing your mind.  You can tell that by the way you keep talking to yourself, if nothing else._

“Fine,” she said in a low voice.  “Might as well go whole hog, then.  Talk out loud _and_ get up and look.”

She would open the door.  She was a grown woman in her own kitschy, cramped, stolen little house, and she was not too scared to turn a doorknob, because to be that scared was just, well, insane.  Her rationality was all she had left.  It was the only thing that said she could beat him: just that thin little hope that he didn’t exist.  That she would open this door and, on the other side, see nothing but a quiet suburban street of Boulder, three or four houses opposite hers with the windows lit by flickering candles.  People sitting on their porches, watching the fireflies spin lazily in the air.  It made no sense that she could smell a woodsy, cedar-like smell as she walked to her own doorstep; a smell of pine needles and soil and the soft, gentle rot of living things.  Their world would all go to grass sooner or later, but here, at least, their yards were not overrun.  There was their little mealymouthed civilization.  That was all she could see.  She should smell the aftermath of rain; the furniture polish she herself had used the day before.  Nothing else.

Nadine put her hand on the doorknob and, in one smooth movement, a pull so swift she felt she could have knocked herself in the face, flung the door open.

And saw, in the half-second before she slammed it shut again in terror, a forest.

**3**

So then she knew, didn’t she?  And wasn’t it better to know?

She was Little Red Riding Hood, she’d strayed off the path, and now she knew where the wolf lived.  Among all those trees that had never been cut.  The pads of his feet soft on that carpet of moldering leaves.

How fucking appropriate.  She had been told to go to grandmother’s house, after all, everybody’s favorite centenarian with her callused hands and her praise-Jesus voice, and, clever Nadine, she had managed to go with her feet but not with her heart, and the wolf had known, had noticed, had come for her.  She wondered if there would be any favor owed to her, somehow, if she opened the door again and walked out voluntarily, her back straight, her head high.  Andromeda to the rock.

But she couldn’t.  She’d thought she had bought into it, the craziness of it— _how I love to love Nadine_ —but the woods had flicked her mind away from her like a shot marble.  She couldn’t find herself.  Her hands were fidgety, damp-palmed.

She burned the Ouija board that night in her small fireplace—the only part of the house she had liked.  She stirred the ashes with a poker until there wasn’t a single legible letter remaining.

And that night she felt his displeasure in her dreams: long earthquake shocks of warning.  She held onto the sides of the bed as if he would throw her from it.

**4**

They shared a back fence, that was how Dayna first noticed something was off.

It was sheer dumb luck that she did, too, because Nadine Cross wasn’t the world’s chummiest neighbor.  They were friendly—they had made the obligatory jokes about borrowing cups of sugar from each other back when they had first settled in, both of them with the pained smiles of people who knew they were too tired and burned-out to come up with anything other than the blandest of clichés—but they weren’t friends.  So it was sheer proximity—well, sheer proximity and that gorgeous lick of white hair—that made Dayna start paying attention.

Nadine had started going out of her own house every morning by the back door, like a woman sneaking away from an affair.  If she’d been a runner, Dayna could have understood it—sure, go in and out through the back so you could ditch your muddy shoes on the kitchen floor instead of where anybody would see, who said the superflu had to kill _Good Housekeeping?_ —but she wasn’t.  There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, especially since she always had to go back around to the front of the house to connect back up with the street to go anywhere else.

And she looked furtive, too, like she didn’t want to get caught.

Though, hell, maybe she had her skin crawling from picking up somehow on the fact that Dayna, tucked into her little breakfast nook with the good morning sunlight, a mug of tea and a book she wasn’t reading, could see her and was getting into the habit of staring.  Maybe that explained away the sneak-look she’d gotten.  But it didn’t explain the fear.  Nadine, always starkly beautiful, woodcut beautiful, had had her lines harshened over the last few days; she was going raw-boned with terror.  An EC Comics girl.

She guessed she could either hang around like some old biddy at the back fence or she could go over and try to be something other than a gossip with nobody to talk to.

There just weren’t enough people left in the world to ignore trouble, even if Dayna had ever been the ignoring-trouble type.

When she came over, she made sure to go to the back door, perfectly casual: that’s where she knocked.

It was a minute—a little too long a time for somebody to have ordinarily rattled around the house before making their way to answer—and then Nadine opened up for her.  Up close, she looked in even worse shape than she had far away.  She’d caked on blush to give herself some color, but it just looked garish on top of that corpse-pallor she’d gotten.

 _God, Nadine, what’s happening to you?_ Dayna wanted to ask, but she had never known anybody in her whole life who looked as much like a library full of closed books.  If she wanted to help, she’d have to be careful how she did it.

She held up the slightly greasy wax paper bundle she’d brought along with her.  “I come bearing gifts.  It’s completely selfish, believe me.  I don’t want to have to walk even one more house down to get somebody to appreciate my brilliance, so if you don’t let me in, I’m just going to sit on your stoop and cry.”

To her surprise, Nadine gave her what seemed like a genuine, if slightly tremulous, smile.  “You don’t seem like the crying kind.”

“It’s like if the dam at Niagara Falls goes down.  When I break, it’s spectacular.”

“Then I can’t have that on my conscience, can I?” Nadine said, stepping back so that Dayna could come in.

The kitchen looked neat enough, if a little bare—no dishes resting in the sink, no crumbs on the table.  But, Dayna thought ruefully, it could be that Nadine was just a little better than she was at keeping things tidy.  You couldn’t count the lack of a water circle on a kitchen table as evidence of foul play.

“I have a sweet tooth,” Dayna said, moving to the counter.  “A sweet tooth and no power is a sad, sad thing, once you get sick of taking candy bars and Oreos out of the grocery store.”

Nadine tilted her head at the bag.  “So you—made chocolate chip cookies on the fireplace?”

“No, that I _would_ bother walking all the way around the neighborhood to brag over.”  She opened the bag so Nadine could see.  “Preacher cookies.  You know, no-bakes.”  She shook out a couple, one into her hand and one into Nadine’s.  “Try.”

Dayna did in fact think they were pretty good, but she’d thought they were pretty good when she had first hit on the idea of making them two weeks back; they weren’t good enough to run around evangelizing about, not these little clumps of oats and chocolate and peanut butter, not anything her grandma had ever called cow-pat cookies, but then again, _once_ again, she wasn’t the domestic type.  She hoped it sounded halfway plausible as an excuse for a visit.  If nothing else, Nadine did seem to like the cookie, and she even took a second.  Dayna hoped it wasn’t the only thing she’d had to eat for the day, but from the way she licked the crumbled oats from the cup of her palm, more unselfconscious than Dayna had ever seen her, she thought it might have been.

Nadine thanked her for the cookies and made a pot of coffee for the two of them, and they sat around in the living room and talked the post-superflu talk that was, at its bottom, the same as small town talk anywhere.  Dayna did it with only half her mind, the other half off somewhere wondering how she was supposed to broach the topic of Nadine looking half like death warmed-over and half like the tremble-lipped ingénue of some Vincent Price Gothic.

She had almost come up with something when she got distracted by, of all things, Nadine’s front door, which didn’t look exactly right.

It was like—like the corners weren’t meeting at the right angle.  Or like it was letting too much light in down at the bottom, though when her eyes finally got all the way down to the floor, she saw that it was pretty much flush.  Each little part of it looked fine, but somehow the gestalt didn’t come together.

Maybe that Escher look had bugged Nadine too, maybe that was why she’d started giving it the cold shoulder.

“What?” Nadine said.

Dayna turned back.  “I’m sorry.  My mind just got up and left, I guess.”

“I was just asking what you were looking at.”

She had the strangest eyes, Dayna thought.  Like dead stars.  The light was still there, but it was just because whatever had happened inside her head hadn’t reached you yet.

“Nothing, I just—I think your door might be a little off.  Does it stick or anything?”

“Hmm,” Nadine said.  Her voice was brittle, ice cracking underfoot.  “You know, I don’t know.  Why don’t you try it and see?”

Sure, Dayna thought, because that was half what she’d come here to do.  She said just the first part out loud.

She opened the door.  “No, seems smooth enough.  So much for those mechanical drawing classes, I guess.”  She closed

_the stone the rose_

the door.  She touched her temple.  What had she been thinking?  Something

_dark_

strange, that was for sure.  She had to slow down, take it step by step.  She was looking in on a friend—well, a sort of friend—who was having some kind of shitty time.

“Seems smooth,” Nadine echoed.  Her eyes looked a little more normal; maybe Dayna was just spooking herself, because God knew there was enough going on lately to get spooked by.

She needed to stop acting like everything was a problem to be taken apart.  She was no Miss Marple, and odds were there was no mystery here.  Everybody’s story before Boulder was an open wound, and she had no clue what Nadine’s life had been like before she had made it to the Free Zone.  For all she knew, Nadine had had a husband or even a child—she had clung so fiercely to Leo and she wore the hurt of sharing him with Larry and Lucy as plainly as a black eye.  She could have been anyone at all.

Dayna said gently, “Nadine, has something been bothering you?”

Nadine laughed.  It was a harsh, cawing sound, and it made Dayna feel the years between them more than she ever had before.  It had such a _you couldn’t possibly understand, little girl_ sound to it.

She tried again.  “Were you married?  I just realized I don’t even know.”  She looked down at Nadine’s bare left hand, but that didn’t mean anything: plenty of people had stripped theirs off a long time back, and hadn’t Nadine and Larry been an item for a while?

Nadine saw where her eyes went.  “No,” she said, in the same rubbed-raw voice.  She sounded almost like she was worn out from either screaming or crying.  “He never gave me a ring.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?  For the fact that he never gave me a ring?  Or because you think he’s dead?”

 _For whatever you want me to be sorry for if you’ll just talk to me about it_.  “He’s still alive?  Wait, are we talking about Larry?”

“Oh, _fuck_ Larry,” Nadine said.  She slammed her coffee cup against its saucer so hard the saucer cracked and the coffee sloshed up over her hand and spread across the table in a widening stain.  “He wouldn’t help me.  I _begged_ him to, and he wouldn’t help me.”  It was like she was trying to convince Dayna this was true.

“I’ll help you,” Dayna said.  She didn’t know what else to do.

Nadine looked at her then like she’d never seen her before.  She bit her lower lip and then opened her mouth, lips parted, but said nothing.  Then: “You’re a lesbian, aren’t you?”

Well, wasn’t that just great.  “Bisexual.  But Nadine, I’m not just asking how you are as some kind of ploy—”

“Will you go to bed with me?” Nadine said.

There was still a patch of coffee cooling on her skin, drying on her hand; her face had a genuine flush to it now underneath that caked-on clown rouge.  She was in a long skirt and a man’s faded button-up shirt, the sleeves rolled up past her elbows, and Dayna knew without being told that the shirt, at least, had belonged to a dead man, whoever had been in the house before her.  It was in how even the edges of the buttons had softened from long handling.  And—something in Dayna’s stomach rolled over at this realization—she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath.  When Nadine breathed, the buttons at her chest parted just enough for Dayna to see a little diamond of pale skin.  She was beautiful, there was no denying that.  Beautiful and terrified and hotter than hell.  Those perfect hands with their unpainted fingernails.  The oil-black color of her eyes.  That fucking hair.

But again, _terrified_.  Something was wrong.  And Dayna had a lot of confidence in herself in that department, but not _that_ much.

“I don’t know that that’s really what you need right now.”

“It is,” Nadine said.  “It’s exactly what I need right now.”  There was so much anger there, the fear just the thinnest ice over a kind of rage Dayna had never seen before.

And there was something between them now, something that gummed up the works of the otherwise ordinary morning, the ticking-away of the minutes on the cardinal clock on the kitchen wall.  More than anything else, it reminded Dayna of what it had been like at the height of the flu, when fucking had briefly been the national pastime.  All those healthy people playing Russian roulette with their lives, screwing anything that moved, kissing like they wanted to swallow each other whole.  _If you’ve got something, give it to me.  I’m done with all this anyway.  If I’m going to go, I’m at least going on my own terms._ She had played that game a little herself.

So now Nadine Cross wanted to play it with her.  She’d caught the fever late.

If she told herself now that she understood what Nadine was after, if she told herself there was no harm in Nadine getting it, did that mean she was doing the right thing?  Or not the wrong one, anyway?  Of course, she could kid herself all she wanted, but in the end, if she screwed Nadine right now, it wouldn’t really be for any kind of therapeutic benefit.  She wanted to.  Had wanted to for a while.

“Then sure,” Dayna said.

Their eyes met.  She found this some consolation: under whatever else there was in Nadine’s face, there was desire, too.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Dayna said.  She stood up and offered her hand to Nadine.  “Who am I to refuse that kind of offer?  I’m only human.”

**5**

Nadine’s bedroom was nothing like Nadine.  The coverlet was lavender and made from some kind of slippery material, too cheap-looking to be silk; there were little ceramic teddy bears all crowded onto a small ivory-colored vanity.

Nadine, with quiet but obviously genuine embarrassment, said, “They came with the house.  I keep meaning to get rid of them, but…”

“But it still feels like somebody else’s house?”

Nadine didn’t answer that, didn’t even nod.  The energy between them had hit a low ebb, and whatever it was downstairs that had vanished the lemony smell of furniture polish and the low background birdsong was gone.  They were two women standing in a bedroom, two women who barely knew each other.  They could have been strangers making awkward small talk at some cocktail party.

Dayna half-thought it would fizzle out then, but to her surprise, Nadine stepped closer to her and put her hands on Dayna’s shoulders, less like she would kiss her and more like they were about to dance.  She said, “You know why I picked this house, Dayna?  Because it’s right next to yours.  I chose it.”  Each word in that husky voice like a hand stroking down Dayna’s back, making her shiver.  “I never choose anything.  I’m glad you came over.  Why did you come over?”

“I told you,” Dayna said, and now she put her hands on Nadine’s waist and stepped lightly to the side, bringing them into a dance after all, bringing them a few inches closer to the bed.  “I made cookies.”

“You’re lying,” Nadine whispered.

Right enough, but the truth was too strange to explain.  So she didn’t try, she just kissed her.

Nadine’s mouth tasted like chocolate and peanut butter, from the cookies, and her lips were just a little chapped, which only made Dayna feel her more, feel every movement.  Nadine sighed, long and low, and her hands went into Dayna’s hair and pulled at it.  Good, that reminded her.  She’d been wanting to touch Nadine’s hair since the day they met.  It was so lush, so soft and yet so heavy.  There was so _much_ of it, like even with the braid loosened and pulled apart, there had to be some other clasp somewhere, like if all of it were really down Nadine would be small in comparison, so delicate compared to this wild and untamed thing.

She unbuttoned Nadine’s skirt and let it fall to the floor.  Nadine made a small, soft noise, one hand drifting to cover herself up.  Then she curled her fingers in and out, moved her hand to her hip, and peeled her underwear off herself.

“I’ve never done this before,” Nadine said.

“It’s not that much different,” Dayna said, grinning at her.  “You’re gorgeous, you know that?”

Nadine surprised her by chuckling, like one of them had made a joke, but then she said, “What do you want me to do?  Should I keep getting undressed?  Do you want to get undressed?”

Dayna had never been one for a striptease: she got herself naked in a hurry.  She wanted Nadine to leave the shirt on, at least for right now, because something about the cloudy blue against her white skin and black hair hit her in exactly the right way, but she didn’t say so, she just let Nadine do it or not do it.  Nadine didn’t.  She let Dayna lay her down on the bed and bring her legs up.  Dayna put her hand between them.

The muscles in Nadine’s inner thighs had gone tight.  Dayna leaned over and kissed her there, softly and lingeringly, not moving her hand yet.

Though, damn, Nadine was wet.  She could feel it all against her palm: slick, endless heat.  She pressed a little, finally, and Nadine moaned.

“See?” Dayna said.  “Not so different.”  Except, she thought, Nadine wouldn’t have to worry about _her_ finishing too early.

But Nadine caught her by the wrist.  “No one,” she said.  “Not just not a woman.  No one.”

Oh.  She’d never thought—Nadine was _older_.  Was she religious?  Had she _been_ religious?

“If you want to stop,” Nadine said, and there was some obscure, horrible flush of triumph in her eyes that Dayna couldn’t parse at all.  “If you want to stop, I’ll understand.  He—he wanted me intact.  An unbroken vessel.  You can stop.”

It was like she’d forgotten where Dayna’s hand was, like she couldn’t tell how much Dayna wanted this too, even though Dayna was bare-assed against this chintzy bedspread, even though she hadn’t even taken the time to yank it down and get on the sheets instead.  She shook her head, almost laughing herself, and took Nadine’s hand, not exactly gently, and guided it to her own cunt, putting Nadine’s fingers against her.

She said, “Does it feel like I want to stop?”

“No,” Nadine said, and she rubbed her fingers—probably just rubbed them together, like she was marveling at the strangeness of feeling how wet Dayna was, but the touch brushed against her clit and Dayna bit back a sound.

Nadine looked startled and pleased.

Dayna said, “Do _you_ want to stop?”

Nadine, her eyes still on the slightly parted lips of Dayna’s cunt, said, “Not remotely.”

“Good,” Dayna said.  “Okay.  Beginners first.”

“Age before beauty,” Nadine suggested.  She had a funny smile, Dayna noted: sharp, like the cut of a gemstone.

Whatever: if Nadine wanted to be self-deprecating, Dayna wouldn’t argue her out of it.  By the time she’d done all she was planning to do, Nadine would have a clear understanding of exactly what Dayna thought of her beauty _and_ that unbroken vessel bullshit.  She set up a rhythm with her hand, stroking Nadine’s clit, circling it.

Nadine, her hips twitching a little, closed her eyes and said, “Can you—go inside me?”

“Sure, but if you’re not used to it, it might—”

“I want to feel you,” Nadine said.  “Everywhere.  All over me.  All _in_ me.”

Dayna’s heart beat faster; her cunt throbbed.  “Then yeah, baby.  Anything you want.”

She went slowly, just one finger for a long time before she even added a second, but all the same, Nadine’s breath had roughened.  She wasn’t relaxed enough for this, no matter what Dayna did, but when she tried to go back to what she’d been doing before, Nadine said, “No, please, just—keep going.  Like that,” and Dayna realized with a start that what she’d taken for pain wasn’t pain at all.  Or wasn’t _just_ pain.  Or wasn’t _uncomplicated_ pain.

She liked that.  She pulled out, teasing, and then opened Nadine up further, with a third finger, liking the way Nadine whimpered at it and spread her legs a little further, her eyes still screwed shut like she didn’t want to get a look at all the fun she was having.  Dayna reached up with her other hand and squeezed Nadine’s breast through that shirt, gratified by the stiffness of Nadine’s nipple even through the cotton.

“Hemline of this is going to be soaked through,” Dayna said idly, and she popped a few buttons off until her hand was against Nadine’s bare skin, her other hand thrusting hard, and Nadine froze for half a second, her body arched so far up into Dayna’s hand that her ass was off the bed, and then she cried out, her hips rolling, her muscles rigid.

Was she allowed to be smug?  Not bad for a first time, she figured, so maybe.

But then Nadine said, “No.  Please.”

Dayna flexed her fingers to get all the feeling back into them.  “Trust me, you don’t want me to just keep going, you could get sore.”

“Is it time?” Nadine said.   _And not to her._ Her voice was calm and dead; _sepulchral_.  A lady of white marble carved upon a tomb.  “Is this it?”

Sweat chilled on Dayna’s skin.  She’d spent her whole life thinking she was brave, and now she wanted to run, well, to hell with that.  “Time for what?”

Nadine looked over at her, and now it was a flicker of horror rather than pleasure passing over her face, flushing her lips, sparking her eyes like glinting onyx.  “ _Him_.”

And Dayna, without even having to ask, she knew who Nadine meant.  From the way Nadine said that hollow absence of a name, everyone in the Free Zone would have known.

The dark man.

**6**

Roland’s first bewildered thought was that she knew him.  She was so unsurprised to have him intrude upon her—he had startled her but not alarmed her.  Her mind was a rumpled blanket, already shared with some lover and scented with him, prickled in places by fallen strands of his hair; whoever he was, Roland was enough like him as to make little difference to her, at least at first.

He had come through the doorway only because he’d been unable to make anything out of what he was seeing from the other side of it—nothing but shaded darkness—but within a moment of stepping over the threshold, he knew, with rare embarrassment, that he had intruded.  He could feel a just-satisfied ache in her loins, and though it was different with a woman, it was still recognizable to him.  He stepped out at once, but not without noticing the resignation with which she had received him.  She, like Detta, had noticed him at once.  But unlike Detta, she hadn’t fought.

“Is it time?” she said.  He was back in his world now, holding onto the edge of her door-frame.  “Is this it?”  The field of her vision never moved.  Dull plaster ceiling.

It was the stillness that worried him, for despite the terror in her voice, still she remained, as motionlessly poised as a child waiting for instruction.  No—as a woman waiting to be beaten.  He thought of his mother, of her white cheek turned up to Marten.

“What’d you do?” Susannah said.  She sounded only curious, but Roland would be a fool to miss how tightly she was holding the arms of her wheelchair: she trusted him, but the hawk David had trusted him, too, and Roland still had scars up and down his arms, as well as his guns, as David’s legacy.  A gunslinger without violence in his—or her—heart wasn’t fit to shoot.  He loved her all the more for it.

“Nothing that I know of,” he said, still observing.

“She clued in pretty quick,” Eddie said.  “Is that why you burned rubber out of there?”

“No, Eddie,” Roland said, a little more snappishly than he’d intended.  “She was—intimately engaged.”  He had called it harsher things than that in the past, but the strangeness of all this seemed to require unusual delicacy.

Eddie blinked at that for a moment and then laughed.  “Shit fire and save the fucking matches, you just got made into a peeping tom.  I take back every bad thing I ever said about _ka_.  _Ka_ , Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are, I love you.  Aw—oh, hey, hey.”  He pointed at the doorway, where the emerging light had grown wobbly, streaky.  All the laughter had gone from his voice.  “I think she’s crying.”

Through the door, they all heard, “Are you _him_?”  The woman’s voice was shaky with terror.  “Please, I’m sorry.”

“You need to go through again,” Susannah said.  “Getting a voice in your head’s not much fun, but it’s got to be even worse when you’re getting ignored by it.  Go on.”

“You say true,” Roland said, with more fervency than he should have had.  _There was a boy.  There wasn’t a boy._ He saw Eddie and Susannah take in the sound of that.  He walked back through the doorway again so quickly in part just to escape their gaze.

He heard—and felt—the intake of the woman’s breath.  “Are you _him_?” she said again.

Her lover had taken hold of her hands and was trying to speak to her—“Nadine, listen to me, he’s not there, he can’t hurt you”—but for all he had borrowed the Maid’s senses, he knew he was hearing this and she was not.  Her panic was a glass cage.  So he answered only her.

_No, sai.  I don’t think I’m who you were prepared to receive.  My name is Roland Deschain, of Gilead._

“Is there no balm in Gilead?”  She spoke softly, but despite that, she had Cort’s own tone of query: this was not a question that wanted an answer.

Nor did it need one.  No, Lady Nadine, Gilead-That-Was now had nothing to offer anyone: all the candles in its windows had been snuffed, all its floors had gone silver with dust.  No physician there could have given her a syrup to gentle her terror, no more than they could have given him a salve to bring together the two cracked parts of his history.

He did not know that he would be a balm to her either, nor she to him.  His fortune had been told and she had not been part of it.  Of course, the man in black could have lied—or at least obscured—and it would have been more like him to do so than not, but even knowing that, the gunslinger still could not trust her, this woman who expected a cuckoo inside herself and received one with pliant dread.  He did not think she meant him ill—he saw little malice in her—but ill-will had never been the only door to trouble.  Acceptance caused its own hurts.

But he could not believe that this door had been as innocently unconnected to him as a rock or a tree, and he could not shake the thought that its appearance was cause for hope that there would be something waiting ahead that could mend him.  If he had been given one door this far past the beach, he might be given another still.  And there, _there_ , might be balm.

 _THE BOY_.  It was only a thought, but there was so little difference in the nowhere-place of the doorway between his mind and his mouth that she heard him anyway.

Her attention was suddenly razor-sharp.  It made him think of Eddie, Eddie as he had been: she was allowing herself to rust, to sink into torpor and submission, but she herself could be salvaged, if someone would take the risk of working with a soul of teeth and wire and suspicion.  There was something there.  She could kill with her heart.

This time, she spoke to him in her head.   _Joe?_

No, but it was so close—it was so tempting to believe.   _Jake?_

She shook her head, his view of the room slashing from side to side.  “ _Joe_.  Leo.”  She said the first name with love, the second with a strange kind of hatred, so blistering that her companion briefly stopped trying to reassure her.

Her lover said, “You tell that son-of-a-bitch to get out of your head like he got out of everyone’s dreams,” and she took the Maid’s face squarely between her hands, fixed the Maid’s—and Roland’s—gaze only on her.  She had short-cropped dust-blonde hair and natural-born gunslinger eyes.  _Her_ he would have drawn with no hesitation.  “Tell him he doesn’t belong there.”

 _No more I do,_ Roland agreed.  _Would you tell your friend I know it?_

 _She’s not my friend,_ the Maid—Nadine—told him.  She did not seem to know this for the lie Roland suspected it to be.  But aloud, she said, “Dayna—it isn’t what you think it is.  It’s not… Vegas.”

Roland did not know Vegas any more than he knew this Joe Leo, and he said so, but Nadine shook him off almost irritably.  Again, he was reluctantly impressed by the bristle of her.  When she ceased playing dead, she could fight well enough.  Suddenly the feel the lovemaking had given her body—the heaviness, the strained muscles—felt like the aftermath of some battle.  And hadn’t he too used himself for all manner of purposes in the name of the Tower?  He recalled the scent of honeysuckle and rose.  And he thought again of his mother.

So he held back whatever conclusions he had wanted to make.  He would do well to remember that he did not know her, not yet.

“All right,” Dayna said.  “So who is he?”

“Paranoid schizophrenia, probably,” Nadine said with terrible bitterness.  “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters.”

Nadine closed her eyes, plunging the two of them again into darkness.  _Roland, who is Jake?_

 _I met him as I traveled across the desert,_ he said, astonished that he could admit such a thing to her when he had not yet admitted it to Susannah and Eddie—though of course, if he had any little crumb of sanity left to him, he had admitted it to Eddie once, as Eddie had dragged him along the beach.  ( _Enough about the fucking boy, Roland.)_ But Eddie would have no way of remembering that, since it had never happened.  So in many ways this was the first true time he had spoken of Jake, but the quality of Nadine’s mind was such that he found it bearable.  Her thoughts fell around him like snowfall, cold and blanketing.

_I met him as I traveled across the desert.  He’d died._

_He died?_

She had not heard him right, he knew, but even having heard him wrong, what she said was true.   _He’d died, and then he died; the first death brought him to me and the second took him away.  And I let him go, but I didn’t, because we never met.  I stopped him from ever coming.  There was no boy.  How could there have ever been a boy?_ All that, at least, he held too closely to himself for her to hear; it was more dream than speech.

Nadine said, “You love him,” though how she had found that in his silence, he didn’t know.

_Yes._

The snowfall inside her now drifted and settled, her conviction growing inch by inch.  Then she said, “Are you on the other side of the door?  In the forest?”

“Nadine—”

“Do you believe in fate?”

“ _No_ ,” Dayna said, at the same time as Roland, who had not yet answered her about the door, said, _Yes_ , thinking how Eddie would laugh if he could hear this; then he remembered Eddie _could_ , or at least he could hear Nadine’s part of the conversation, and he felt a strange tightening across his chest, the ache of familiarity in love.

 _Yes.  We call it_ ka.

“ _Ka_.  In ancient Egypt, that’s what they called the soul.  Is that what you mean?”

 _I’m no philosopher.  The soul of the Tower, maybe._ Because Nadine had made him think of his mother, he tried to remember how she had explained the world to him in the days when he had still been young enough to be allowed to shelter behind her skirts.   _It’s what you run to._

 _Or what you run away from?_ She didn’t wait for him to answer.   _The only place I have to run to is trouble._ Her thoughts were no longer like snow but like leaves blowing around him in a wind.  The oracle again, he thought with his tongue growing strangely numb.  He had offered himself to the oracle.  Why could he not keep from thinking of that?  Of the mark on his mother’s throat?  _Marten_.

Despite the chaos inside her mind, Nadine’s voice was steady.  “Wherever you’re from, it sounds like it’s somewhere far away.”

 _Yes.  On a different level of the Tower._ Given her lover’s alarm, he’d thought to press the doorway forward into her mind, bring her to see it the way he had brought Eddie to see it, so that he might truly pass through, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t _find_ it.  He was like a drunk man groping around in the dark.  Well, he was not necessarily a reassuring man to see, so there may have been no aid there in any case.  If he was not meant to go through, he was not meant to go through.

It was all meant for _something_ , though.

Then he remembered.  _Nadine, you asked me about a forest.  Can you see it?_

“Out my front door,” she murmured.

_Will you go and open it?_

“And go to you?”

“ _Don’t_ go to him,” Dayna said.

But Nadine’s body was moving again: she was buttoning the man’s shirt she wore.  She ignored the skirt on the floor and went instead to a white chest of drawers and took out a pair of jeans.  Roland thought the fabric of them looked flimsy, but was distracted from that by the mirror above the dresser, by Nadine’s brief glance at herself.

She looked, he thought, like a queen.  Her hair was long, a lustrous black, but there was a wide white streak running down it, like the star on a horse’s head.  The lines of her profile were strong and proud, stone-chiseled.  There was a fated look to her, as if she were a woman marked for either glory or an early death.

_What would you do to me, if I came to you?_

_Nothing_ , he said honestly, but then that same honesty compelled him to admit, _But those who fall in with me do not always live the longest lives.  My companions and I are on a dangerous road.  I can promise you no protection._

“But there’s no Vegas where you are,” Nadine said.  “You said that.  No flu?”

_The flux?  I’ve known much sickness in my life._

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Dayna said, and Nadine turned around just in time for Roland to see her sliding out of bed, a naked, slimly muscular woman.  She started to get dressed.  “If you’re not going to tell me what’s going on—if _neither of you_ are going to tell me what’s going on—I guess I’ll have to go see for myself.”

**7**

Dayna realized Nadine wasn’t following her.  Disappointment got a clammy hold on her and she couldn’t shake it off.  So Nadine had needed her—though hell if she knew why—but now she didn’t.  Now she had Somebody Else.  She had seen and dreamed too much over the last year to doubt that Nadine’s Somebody Else was real, but it didn’t follow that he was good or trustworthy.  Nadine had taken him for the dark man, and Dayna would need to see some pretty fucking compelling evidence against that theory to reject it.

She thought she knew where to find it.

And boy, did she know the exact moment Nadine realized where she was going and what she was going to do, because she suddenly ran out of her bedroom to the top of the stairs and screamed, “Dayna, no!”

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” Dayna said.  She put her hand on the doorknob.  It was warmer than last time, almost hot.  She glanced back and saw that Nadine was frozen at the top of the stairs, her hands wrapped white-knuckled around the bannister.  “I won’t.  But I at least need to know what I’m being made third wheel to, okay?”

“It’s not safe,” Nadine whispered, but that, Dayna noticed, was no longer _no_.

Besides, what was safe anymore?

She opened the door.

She saw a hodgepodge of trees that made no sense together, California redwoods alongside New England red maples; pine, ash, oak.  Glistening spiderwebs were strung between trunks she couldn’t have wrapped her arms around.

And below all that: people.  Three of them.  A young black woman in a wheelchair, an even younger white guy down at her feet, and—

 _That’s not him_ , Dayna told herself.   _He just looks how you think the guy would look._

It wasn’t him because the dark man didn’t have a face and the man before her did: a weary, weather-beaten one, stippled with stubble and battered by hard years.  He didn’t square with the haunting glee, the chirping malevolence of all her bad dreams.  He wouldn’t have the same kind of smile, if somebody with that face could even smile at all.  No way of knowing at the moment, since he was as unconscious as a rag-doll.

So she made eye-contact with the couple instead.  “Hi.”  What else did you say to fantasy world people who could have been elves if they weren’t dressed in dirty denim and equipped with one mean, Goliath-looking motherfucker of a wheelchair?

“Hi yourself,” the woman said.  “I’m Susannah Dean.  This is my husband, Eddie.”

“Hi,” Eddie said.  She’d thought he was outclassed by his wife until he smiled—that evened up the score a little.  “So we couldn’t hear all that, but I’m guessing Roland’s making his usual stellar first impression.”  He spoke wryly, but he moved his hand at the same time, carding his fingers through the hair of the man lying on the ground in front of them.

“We’re more from your neck of the woods,” Susannah said.  “Me and Eddie.  New York, both of us.  Thirty years apart, but still.  Roland, though, he’s genuinely from somewhere else.”

“It’s okay, I think,” Dayna said, remembering Nadine and turning to call up to her.

“It’s okay,” Eddie said hastily, “but it’s trippy as _shit_ if she looks directly at us.  I mean, Roland’s world,” he held up one hand, “and physics,” the other hand as far away as possible, “are kind of like this, but we’re not really talking to you face-to-face, if you kennit.”  He didn’t seem to notice he had said anything unusual, but Susannah smiled.  “Our side of the door—we’re looking out through Nadine’s eyes.  The only reason we know you’re here is because she can see and hear you talking to us.”

Nadine had come down the stairs but had accordingly stayed off at an angle from the door.  “Roland says he’s going to try going back through to his side now.”

“Smart,” Susannah said approvingly.  “It’d make for easier conversation and less of a headache, anyhow.”

Nadine closed her eyes and then her lips parted expressively—it was so close to how she had looked when she’d come that Dayna had to turn away from her, to get the pang out of her stomach—and then she exhaled.  Dayna looked back through to the woods, where Roland was climbing to his feet.  He was tall—most of him was legs—and he had antique handguns on his hips.  She somehow knew they would fire just fine.  This guy was no dress-up cowboy, he was the real thing.

He touched his throat, six little taps.  “ _Sai_ Dayna.  _Sai_ Nadine.”

“You didn’t _sai_ me or anything when we first met,” Eddie said.

Roland did have a smile after all, and it took away the last of Dayna’s fear of him.  “When we first met, Eddie, you were smuggling cocaine.”  He said the last word slightly wrong— _coca_ - _aine_.

“We’ve all got histories you could play a good game of checkers on,” Susannah said, her hand drifting to her husband’s shoulder.  “What I want to know about is what’s this flu you were talking about.  Eddie pegged you all for the seventies, which is too late for me, but he didn’t remember any kind of epidemic from around then.”

Nadine gave another one of her harsh laughs.  “Trust me,” she said, “you’d remember it.”  There was too much tension in her face: she was a creature of rigid muscles and raked-back hair, some goddess of the post-flu world, empty-beautiful-dangerous-wild.  But it was the first time Dayna had ever seen her look like she was really there with everyone else, the only time she hadn’t seemed like a ghost hitchhiker who would be gone by the next red light.  There was a frightening vitality in her face, a hunger that had never been satiated, that had nothing to do with anything they had done upstairs.

She’d taken hold of the doorframe and she swayed a little, her body tilting back toward Dayna.  Gravity was the force of nature that loved a fall, the only kind of fate Dayna would concede and one that rankled her as much as any other.  She understood why people dreamed of winged angels and built planes and rollercoasters and space shuttles.  And she understood, even against her will, why allowing Nadine to lean back like that was a bad idea.

Nadine thought the dark man was after her.  If he was, Roland’s world seemed like a better place than theirs to hide from him.

“Flu later,” Dayna said crisply.  “Choices now.”  Nadine looked at her, a question in her eyes.  Dayna looked away.  “You want to go, right?  _He’s_ after you?”

“Roland says he’s never even heard of Vegas,” Nadine said in a low voice.

“Yeah, we _wish_ he’d heard of Vegas,” Eddie said.  “You know how short this place is on vacation spots?”

“I don’t know what any of this is,” Dayna said, “but this seems like it’s maybe more what you need than a good screw.”  She hadn’t meant to say it like that.  She just felt—cheap, somehow, even though she’d done more with people she’d known less and even though they hadn’t promised each other anything.  But she had wanted to be the hero, and now, when confronted with a damsel in distress and a place straight out of Tolkien, the best she could do—the most helpful thing she could do—was to let go.  It went against the grain of her.  She was carving out a concession that was bound to leave her a little ragged inside.

Nadine said, “Dayna,” and then stopped.  She dug her fingernails hard into the soft wood of the doorframe.  Her hair— _God_ , her _hair_ , look at her _hair_ —was blowing straight back from her head like the angles of the house had tilted suddenly.  Like the building itself was trying to buck her off.

“No,” Nadine said.  It was almost a sob.  “Please.”  But her hands: her hands were still as hooked into the doorframe as she could get them.  She wasn’t letting go.

There was a man standing in the corner of the room.  He stank of bird-shit and blood.

He had a face, Dayna noted almost dispassionately, but not a real one.  He had made a mask out of skin and bone, that was all.  He looked like he was someone, but he was no one.

A smile over rage over envy over a vast, howling emptiness.

He said, “Hold her, Dayna,” and his voice was like oil.  “Hold her just this little while and I’ll stand you beside me forever, my right hand girl.  I’ll give you all the excitement you could ever want.  She’s not worth it, you know.  She’s a liar.  She’s _faithless_.  Didn’t you hear that she begged Larry Underwood to fuck her?”

“So what,” Dayna said.  She couldn’t look at his eyes along longer, though his gaze seemed to hold her like a fishhook under her skin.

“She says she wants safety, but she’s dangerous,” he went on in the same eminently reasonable tone.  “She’s always been dangerous.  She knew herself for my intended and she still marched.  Right.  Here.  And sat among all you nice, clean-living people like a landmine waiting for a boot.  Tick-tock boom, here comes the broom, to sweep away all the good boys and girls.”  He conjured up a dark red stone and held it out to her.  “These are eyes that were his pearls.  I’ll give it to you, Dayna.  All the power you could ever want, all the excitement.  Take it.  _Take her._ ”

“Big deal.”  At last she tore herself away from him: she addressed all this to the wallpaper above his head, which was now sweating slightly, as if he were moldering the wood underneath it.  As if he were a flood trying to seep in over their heads.  “You’re some pissant ex-boyfriend.  You don’t have anything I want.  And in case you can’t tell, you’ve been _dumped_ , buddy.”

But he couldn’t tell, could he?  The dark man could sense Nadine—could sense that she’d been ready to leave him.  So he already knew what they had done, but _that_ hadn’t gotten his attention, for all his bullshit about her being _intact_.  He hadn’t gotten up off his ass for _that_.  Did he think what Dayna had done for her, what Nadine had done for herself, didn’t matter?  _I know the smell of_ her, she wanted to _say, and she shook around me like she never will around you._ And now here he was, trying to get her on his side, like she had never counted as a rival at all.  Like Nadine’s yes had never mattered at all.

 _Fuck him_.  Her anger firmed up the ground beneath her feet; cleared her head.

Then she saw Nadine’s fingers start to slip.  Roland grabbed for her, but his hand seemed to hit glass.

 _It only swings open one way,_ Dayna thought, as her feet stayed on the floor and Nadine’s rose off it, Nadine’s door now almost on the ceiling even though it was still nice and flush with the floor.  Her gravity and Nadine’s no longer the same.  Their fates diverging.  If Nadine fell, Roland and the rest could not come get her.  If she fell, this was all over, because she would have to try again, and each time there would be a little less of her to do it.

The dark man’s smile, which had many teeth, widened; his mouth opened.   _He’ll catch her.  He’ll eat her alive._

Dayna couldn’t let him smile like that.  She pitched herself forward—pitched herself _up_ , her stomach lurching—and straight into Nadine.  Their gravities and fates entangled once again and the angles tilted just enough in their favor.

Together, they fell over the threshold to a different world.

**8**

Nadine’s front door closed behind her with a soft, polite click, and then blazed up in a frenzied fire.  The heat singed her hair and crackled at her skin, but then someone was dragging her forward, her and Dayna both, dragging them away from the sudden inferno.  It burned hot and orange for almost a full minute before its flames turned an unbearable candy-pink.  No ashes ever fell.  By the time the fire was gone, it might as well have never been.

_I hated that house anyway._

All around them, there was nothing but forest.  The Free Zone, its houses, its people, its raggedy salvaged America—they were all gone.

Roland’s sleeves were blackened, Eddie’s face white.  Susannah was draping a wool blanket over Dayna’s shoulders, despite the warmth of the day.

Nadine, curled up on the forest floor, couldn’t stop laughing.

**9**

All in all, Eddie thought, just another day in Mid-World.

He was spooned up against Susannah’s back on their shared blanket-roll, idly stroking her hip, when she said, “It made me think about Detta and Odetta.”

Eddie put the pieces together pretty quickly.  “Being Nadine seeing Nadine seeing us?”

Susannah smiled even though she knew he couldn’t see her, and she pulled his arm up over her, ran her thumb across his knuckles.  “I wanted to close my eyes.”  She’d tried to tell herself there was no reason to get so skittish, but the refracted doubling of it all had made her feel like there was a cliffside in her head that she could fall from with just one little mistake.  She had looked, in the end, out of some maybe-misbegotten notion that, for whatever it was worth, she was a gunslinger now and gunslingers aimed with their _eyes_ , so she had damn well better _use_ them—had looked, but hadn’t been able to stop her hands from shaking.

“Suze, I used to close my eyes when Bambi’s mom died.  I think you’re entitled.”

“Entitled or not, it’s not what I want for myself.”  She laughed shortly.  “I like the idea of there _being_ a myself, for starters.  Susannah Dean.”

He kissed her shoulder.  “With everything that was going on back then, Roland almost croaking on the beach and all, I forgot, you know, to say thanks.  You are absolutely, positively the best thing to ever happen to the Dean name.  _You_ , not Odetta.”

“And not Detta?”

“Detta was going to let me get my face eaten off by talking lobsters.  I get that she has her uses, Suze, but she’s a bitch.”

“Bitch or not, I need her.”

“I know,” Eddie said.  He sounded like he really did—given the lobstrosities, she had to admit that was magnanimous of him.  “And you’ve got her.”

“Mm.”  She knew she wasn’t going to resolve anything tonight—maybe wasn’t going to resolve anything ever, not more than she already had—and so she let her worry go, drift out like a buoy.  Let Eddie hold her hand.  “Talk to me about something else, Eddie.”

“Your wish is my command.  Actually, I’ve been dying to tell you this one all day.  You know how when Devil Went Down to Georgia was going after Dayna to grab Nadine for him, he said Nadine had almost gotten with Larry Underwood?”

“Whoever that is.”

“Who that _is_ , sweetheart,” Eddie said in an obnoxious tone of voice she felt silly for liking as well as she did, “is Larry _Pocket Savior_ Underwood, the rocker.  After your when.  I had his first album.  The second one was kind of shitty, but the third one was okay.  Pretty catchy.  But, like, Larry Underwood’s _dead_.  Not your average flameout, no downward spiral, the guy was kind of the comeback kid, just bad luck.  A hot shot and a couple of late paramedics.  When I was twenty.”

“I hate to break your heart, sugar, but I think the world’s got room for more than a couple Larry Underwoods at a time.”

“I thought about that,” Eddie said triumphantly, “so I talked to Dayna a little about it, kind of snooping around, and _their_ Larry Underwood is definitely _my_ Larry Underwood.  I’ll give you more than one guy with the same name, but more than one with the same name and the same pouty-Elvis look?  Same don’t-fuck-with-me vibe?  Huh-uh, babe, I don’t think so.”

“All right,” Susannah said, amused.  “So what’s the big deal about it?  You wish you’d gotten a chance for an autograph?”

“I wouldn’t have turned one _down_ , but no, it’s just—their Larry Underwood has a seat on the town council or whatever Dayna called it.  One universe over, one bad flu, and my B-grade rock-and-roller is a stand-up guy voting on how to get cleaner water.  And their nice guy is some dick feuding with his manager and dying with a needle in his arm.”

And she guessed she could figure out why that struck him the same way the doorway had struck her, even if he hadn’t worked it out himself.  They all had their own heights to fall from.  Eddie, who still scratched at the insides of his arms when he got nervous, had the fuck-up cliff, the knowledge that one universe over, he was maybe dead himself.

“Everybody’s life can go all kinds of different ways, I suppose,” she said.

“I guess.  You like them?”

“Nadine and Dayna?  I think I do.  Could be they’ll bring us a whole passel of trouble, but we’re never free of that anyway.”

“Yeah, no kidding.  I think Roland’s gonna get himself a little crush on Dayna.  ‘Natural-born gunslinger.’”  Jealousy threaded through that—she could have laughed about it if Eddie’s craving for Roland’s approval wasn’t just one more bit of trouble coming down the pike.  “From what I can tell, he wouldn’t be doomed to disappointment on it, except—”

Except for how she had never stopped looking at Nadine.  “Except for,” Susannah agreed.  “You think they made the right call, coming with us?”

“What, compared to getting hitched to the dark prince?”

But he knew what she’d meant.  There was no reason for Roland to already be teaching them how to shoot if they weren’t going to stay.  All things serve the Beam.  He started to say that he didn’t know whether they had or not—he loved Roland’s Tower, but he was pretty sure he would wind up dying for it one way or the other—but then he did know.  Mostly because of Larry Underwood, because of Detta and Odetta.  Because he really did believe they would know what to do for Roland when he finally spilled about whatever was eating at him.  They were all better off together, and the danger had its own funny way of keeping them safe.

“Yeah,” Eddie said firmly.  “I do.”

**10**

Nadine found Roland by the fire.  The orange light cast strange shadows on his face, and not for the first time, she wondered how old he really was.  Older than his face, younger than his eyes.

“Can’t sleep?” Roland said.

Nadine smiled.  “It’s been an eventful day.”

“You say true, I say thankya.  I’ve known longer and worse, but—”  He poked at the wood, stirring up sparks.  He didn’t finish whatever it was he’d been saying.  Instead, he said, “The man who came for you, before you and Dayna made it through.”

She moved closer to the fire.  “The dark man.”

Roland knew it needed to be done, the way a broken bone needed to be set, but it pained him: she reminded him so much of his mother.  Yet the truth was the only way.  Over the years, he’d oft said no more of the truth than was convenient for him, and he did not feel guilty for it.  The preachers promised he would be judged for it all someday, and as far as he was concerned, it could wait until then.  He had other sins to weigh more heavily on his heart.  But to lie to her, in this way, about this—it was like Marten, not like him.

_And are you not like him yourself?  She took you for him, after all._

He shook his head, negating nothing.  “I knew him.  Nadine, I saw him dead, but—he is a man who makes a habit of dying.  I followed him all the way across the desert, over centuries.  He is of my world as well as yours.”

“The desert where you met Jake?” Nadine said.

It was not the reaction he had expected.  “Yes.”  The word was a stone on his tongue.  The time, he knew, had come to tell his _ka-tet_ what was happening to his mind, but loyalty to Eddie and Susannah barred him from beginning that with her.  But for now, at least, and in the dark, he allowed himself the pretense of certainty.  Yes, he had met Jake Chambers in the desert.

“I could feel it,” she said.  She was looking out at what could be seen of the horizon through the woods—looking, therefore, straight down the path of the Beam towards the Tower.  “Not Jake.  Him.”  She touched her throat.  “He holds me here, all the time.  Sometimes less, sometimes more, but never not at all.  Not for as long as I can remember.  And it didn’t go away when I was with Dayna, and it didn’t go away when I came here.”

Before, the terror had been a sickness inside her, sapping her of all her strength, bending her to want what she could not resist—yet now, with nothing changed, she smiled.  He was not a man who understood women.  He was not, he dryly admitted to himself, even a man who understood other men.

“You’re wondering why I’m not running screaming for the hills,” Nadine said.

“Yes.”

She held out her hands, warming them by the flames.  “You said your _ka_ was what you ran to, or what you ran away from.  I think it’s what you wait for, too.”

He nodded.  He watched a single ember die out.  “ _Ka_ like a wind.”

“I waited for him.  He got closer.  I ran from him.  I didn’t get away.”  _So it’s inevitable_ , he imagined her saying, but her voice was not resigned.  She said, “I’m not going to run to him—I don’t _think_ —but if I keep running away from him, if I wait for him, he’s my fate, it’s all him.  If I don’t decide, it’s decided.  Is that how it works?”

He had never heard of anyone changing _ka_.  But he said, “I don’t know.”

“I’d never gone against him before.  I don’t know why it makes me feel better when it didn’t even work.  I think it’ll feel good to ignore him, too, even if that doesn’t work either.”

“Sometimes the action matters more than the outcome,” Roland said.  Cort had never told him that—there had been very little romanticism in Cort, and none at all when it came to winning or losing—but his father had.  His mother too.  Both of them had had reason to know.

“You say true,” Nadine said, now with a hint of mockery in her smile.  He was almost glad to see that little bit of cruelty in her; properly mastered, it would serve her well, it would make the necessary defiance she was taking up have a savor whatever the cost.  And it went well—often regrettably well—with the smell of gunpowder.

Nadine stood.  All she said for her farewell was, “I’m sorry about your boy,” as though Jake had been his son.

Roland stayed awake for a long time.

**11**

Dayna awoke to Nadine looking at her through the gray, starlit darkness.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into all this,” Nadine said softly.

It was so mild that Dayna was tempted to laugh.  It sounded like she had made Dayna escort her to some kind of _Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-_ style dinner; if an apology were needed, and Dayna wasn’t convinced it was, then this was still the wrong kind.  “You didn’t drag me into anything.  You were falling.  I stopped you.  It was my call, and believe it or not, I’ve made ones that have worked out worse.”

“I doubt that.”

“Doubt all you want, it’s still true.”  She looked around.  “I always liked camping, at least.”

“I’m not—”  Nadine stopped.  She said, “I’m not who you think I am, Dayna.  I’m not like you.  I’m not… _good_.”

But Dayna didn’t see how that was true.  Nadine had hidden herself from the dark man and whatever it was he wanted from her, wanted _for_ her; she had run from him.  She had taken care of Leo.  Mother Abigail didn’t like her, and Dayna guessed she could now understand why, but she startled herself by thinking Abigail had been wrong.  Everybody ended up on the seesaw at one time or another.  What the hell was the point of only ever sticking up for the people who were firmly on the ground, whether they were on the right side or not?

She could have given Nadine to the dark man.  She wouldn’t have, but she could have.  And it was frighteningly easy for _could_ to become _would_.

She had no interest in spelling all that out, though.  It was late, she’d been asleep, she was in another dimension, and she was just a little bit heartbroken.  She knew that last part was unfair—just because Susannah and Eddie had apparently tossed some rice up in the air before they’d barely made each other’s acquaintance, just because the Free Zone seemed chockfull of people moving in together just because they’d briefly seemed like the only two people alive, didn’t mean that she had any claim on Nadine.  Just because of a few conversations, a crush, some cookies, a pretty nice time in bed.  So she especially wasn’t going to say that, because she wasn’t an asshole, but not saying it didn’t mean she had to have a deep and meaningful talk about forgiveness and good and evil at two o’clock in the morning.

“You’re good enough for me,” Dayna said.  She turned back over onto her side; turned the conversation just as neatly.  “And I’d say you’re good enough for Roland too, at least.  He was inside your head, wasn’t he?”

Nadine was silent, and then she said, “Maybe I could start by getting good in bed.”

A beat.  Dayna rolled to face her again.  “What?”

“I’m not an expert,” Nadine said gravely, “but it seems to me like you got left a little high-and-dry, what with everything that happened.  Let me make it up to you.”

Dayna shook her head.  “Nadine, it’s not going to work.  Whatever you think is going to scare him off, it’s not.  Not with me, anyway.  We did it, it’s done, he didn’t care, and now you’re a whole universe away anyway.”

She didn’t know what to make of Nadine’s smile.  “You’re right.  It’s not going to work.”  And she leaned down and kissed Dayna, soft and hot, her hand drawing slowly up to Dayna’s breast and cupping it through her shirt.  Right up against Dayna’s mouth, she said, “Sometimes the action matters more than the outcome.  And you, Dayna Jurgens, give very good action.”  Dayna couldn’t see her blush, but she could feel it, a kind of heat baking off her face.  “A woman could fall in love.”

“Could she?” Dayna said.  She pushed her fingers back through Nadine’s hair.  Her heart was pounding: she felt like this was some first fumble in the back of a car.

Nadine said, “Very much so.”

**12**

Eddie’s wooden key had been lost in the retrieval of Jake, or Nadine thought Roland might be wearing it still.

Jake, well-spoken and composed, was nothing like Leo.  Nadine had tried not to love him, since he was Roland’s first and foremost; she tried to handle her own bitterness delicately, to not put herself in circumstances that would open up doors best left closed.  But love him she did, inevitably, and she was surprised by how little pain it gave her.  Though some days, of course, were better than others.

Dayna helped her, she thought, and when she finally felt the tentative connection of _ka-tet_ , that helped her still more.  She was the last one to feel it, as if fate itself were as skeptical of her as Mother Abigail had been.  Evidently, though, it had decided that she would do, at least for a little while.

She had still imagined herself as somehow apart from the rest of them, marked as someone to avoid, territory too full of fault-lines; she trusted Dayna’s love for her but no one else’s.  It was Eddie who, before Topeka, put an end to that insistence in her head in almost the same way as he had put an end to the voices in Roland: with a charm to hang around her neck.

It looked like a wedding ring.

“I meant to make one for Susannah,” he said, with faint sheepishness.  “But this one wanted to be yours—it felt like the key.  I didn’t know if it might help with, you know.  Mr. Handsy.”

It wasn’t the right size for her finger, but he had a leather thong for it, so maybe it wasn’t meant to be.  She knotted the cord and put it around her neck.  It hung there loosely, a touch that was nothing like the one she was so familiar with.

“Does it do anything?” Eddie said, hooking his thumbs into his pockets and looking away from her.

Not in the way she knew he meant—the cold hand was there still—but in another way it did.  The ring settled down low on her chest, just above her heart, and made her conscious of it.  It made her feel real.  It was something of _theirs_ , something with a story that couldn’t be untangled from Roland’s, Jake’s, Susannah’s, Eddie’s; from Dayna’s.  It said that she had had a choice to make and this was what she’d chosen.  It said there was love.

“Yes,” she said.  “Thank you.”

Dayna was the only one she told the whole truth to, and the ring fit Dayna’s finger perfectly, when Dayna’s hand was against her heart.  That was all the fate she wanted.


End file.
